Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles

by Standiford, Les

  IT IS A BIT LESS than twenty miles on through the forest, through Green Valley and across the canyon crest of the Sierra Madre to Lake Elizabeth, which is often mistaken for a reservoir instead of the naturally occurring sag pond that it is, a feature that in fact constituted a formidable obstacle to the long-ago plans of William Mulholland. Lake Elizabeth and environs constitute a pleasant enough area these days, with RV parks, recreational opportunity, and—judging by the number of billboards—home-site and development acreage abounding, but any vestiges of urban living by this point lie far behind. Beyond the ridgeline to the north of Lake Elizabeth, all roads lead down toward the arid plain of the Antelope Valley, where the namesake pronghorn once thrived and where, at another time of year, one could be diverted by a visit to the nearby California Poppy Reservation and a stroll through a nearly 2,000-acre carpet of the eponymous orange flowers.

  In January, however, poppies are just a fever dream for a desert traveler, as is the thought of the buried aqueduct that parallels the narrow blue highway route northward toward civilization’s last outpost—in Mulholland’s time, as now—at Mojave, about a hundred miles north of Los Angeles. Though the reasons to travel to Mojave are presently largely practical, the point of this journey is anything but. Still, if one were compelled for some reason to follow the route of Mulholland’s aqueduct, one would find a way downhill and eastward across the seemingly limitless valley to California’s Route 14, which leads to Mojave, which, whatever one might be moved to say about it today, was not very much at the turn of the twentieth century.

  Sprouted in 1876 from the high desert plains (its altitude is 2,762 feet, and its average annual rainfall does not fill three-quarters of a cup), Mojave was originally a work camp for the Southern Pacific Railroad and later a terminus for the fabled twenty-mule-team wagons bearing borax mined in Death Valley on the Nevada border, 200 miles to the northeast. Though it would later become something of an aerospace and military aviation center (Edwards Air Force Base and China Lake Naval Air Station are close by), Mojave’s chief appeal to Mulholland was simple: in 1907, you could get there from Los Angeles by train, and at the time, that was as close to the distant Owens Valley as one could easily travel.

  From Mojave all the way to Bishop, the northernmost settlement in the eighty-mile-long Owens Valley, it is a little more than 170 miles, a journey that took Mulholland and his original traveling companion to the area, Fred Eaton, a former mayor of Los Angeles, several days. A century or so later, it takes the undiverted traveler a little less than three hours to make the trip, with hardly a traffic signal on the way. Most who travel the route northward (California 14 merges with US 395 about forty miles north of Mojave, near China Lake) are indeed undiverted, bound for the jump-off to the Mount Whitney Trail or the ski or summer resort areas near Mammoth Lakes, another forty-five miles beyond Bishop in the High Sierra. Most of those travelers likely view those intervening miles as an ordeal to be endured, more or less the way a child measures the run-up of days from Thanksgiving to Christmas.

  It is a generally gradual climb out of Mojave for the eighty or more miles to the Haiwee Pass, where one gains the Owens Valley, and there is very little along the way to suggest that an immense amount of water is thundering in the opposite direction, closely parallel to the driving route. To the west, the southern terminus of the Sierra Nevada looms treeless and foreboding, and to the east, the view over China Lake and beyond suggests that Death Valley is a forgiving description for this terrain. No towering eucalyptus here, no pines, no grassy median strip or shoulders. Just sand and scrub and a landscape as riven as a hag’s face.

  Still, about twenty miles north of Mojave, one can turn westward off Route 14 and twist along an unremarkable desert blacktop road for a mile or so to where a startling sight appears: in the midst of country as dramatic as any from a Technicolor Western of the 1950s, a leviathan of pipeline suddenly heaves into view. It is the massive Jawbone Siphon, 8,000 feet of one-and-one-eighth-inch-thick steel, ten feet in diameter, plunging downward from a ridge to the north, then hurtling a mile or more across the rugged valley floor, then charging back up the canyon wall to the south, plug-full of water rushing toward Los Angeles.

  As remarkable as the mechanical acrobatics is the visual contrast: 80-million-year-old late-Paleozoic terrain traversed by a steel-encased river dreamed up a century ago on its way to a city of vast importance—for a relative instant in geological time, at least. Jawbone Canyon is not the only place where the modern and the ancient sit side by side, but there are few where the antipodes are so starkly laid out.

  Edward Abbey, the highly regarded western writer of Desert Solitaire (1968), was once given what he thought of as a plum assignment—writing the text of a Sierra Club publication touting the beauties of an area in the Appalachian Mountains. When he returned from his initial research trip, this writer asked him how it went. “I had a really hard time there,” Abbey said. Familiar with his prickly personality, I asked if it had to do with the people who were showing him around. “Oh no,” Abbey said. “They were fine. It was the place itself. Just too damn much to look at.” In the elemental landscape of Jawbone Canyon, no such problem presents itself.

  There are other spots of interest along the climb toward the Owens Valley, of course. A few miles up the road from Jawbone is Red Rock Canyon State Park, where the rugged cliffs have provided a striking backdrop for films as diverse as The Mummy, The Big Country, and Jurassic Park, and farther along, in the fold just below the pass that leads up into the valley, one can amble a few miles eastward down an access road for a glimpse of the seven miles or so of reservoirs created by the North and South Haiwee Dams. It is here that the waters of the Owens River have their last wash of sunlight before entering the pipes and concrete-covered conduits that take them on to the San Fernando Valley, and the view provides another of those striking contrasts common to the territory: the stark peaks of the Coso Range to the east, the snowcaps of the Sierra Nevada looming to the west, and a seemingly impossible expanse of blue water stretched between.

  From Haiwee, it is only a skip and a little jump over the pass to a wide spot on Highway 395 that is Olancha, home to a couple hundred hardy souls, where one enters the Owens Valley at last, nearly 200 miles north of Los Angeles. Olancha marks what was once the original end of the line for the Owens River, which descended through the valley for some ninety miles to this place where the Cosos butt up against the Alabama Hills trailing from the Sierra Nevada, forming a natural impasse for the river. There were some few times in the late Pleistocene when extraordinary runoff from the Sierra swelled the waters of Owens Lake into overflow down the canyons past Haiwee (think: how China “Lake” got its name). But Owens Lake was for most of its last thousand years a trapped body of water, ever increasing in its salinity, about twelve miles long and eight miles wide, ranging in depth from thirty to fifty feet. In its heyday, the lake was a significant nesting and migratory stop for ducks, geese, grebes, gulls, sandpipers, and various other species. Today, and despite the expenditure of about $1.2 billion by the City of Los Angeles to regenerate its marshlands, it is virtually dry, a vast alkali flat that is the source of some of the state’s most significant air pollution when seasonal winds kick up.

  It should also be mentioned that the traveler has been resident for some thirty miles now in the County of Inyo, the diversified topography of which, as its chief chronicler, W. A. Chalfant, once observed in The Story of Inyo (1922, 1933), “is matched by no other on earth.” Early on in his history, Chalfant points out that nearby Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the continental United States at 14,500 feet, is not all that formidable when compared to some in the Himalayas. But, as he notes, this county is also home to the lowest point in the United States, in Death Valley, at nearly 300 feet below sea level. Furthermore, with only about eighty-five miles separating them, one is clearly visible from the other.

  Even without a side trip to Death Valley or a surveyor’s instruments, any late-after
noon traveler to the Owens Valley soon recognizes the Inyo extremes Chalfant refers to. One moment, it seems, the land laid out north of Olancha and nearby Cartago is awash in sunlight, and in the next, all is shade. If a glance at the 12,000- to 14,000-foot Sierras looming to the west were not enough to explain, a stop at the Interagency Visitor Center at Lone Pine, another twenty miles along will clarify: among other things, a huge topographical model of the region shows that the rate of decline from the top of the nearby Sierras, where the southernmost glacier in the United States is found, to the 4,000-foot floor of the Owens Valley is among the steepest in the world. While the western slopes of the Sierras rise up at a relatively leisurely rate, taking some fifty miles to ascend from the San Joaquin Valley, it is only ten to fifteen miles eastward from the tips of Mount Whitney and its cousins to the riverbed that courses the Owens Valley floor. This precipitous drop makes for a relatively early twilight in all seasons, though that is hardly the most significant effect.

  Moisture condenses evenly and reliably as the winds off the Pacific rise up those western slopes. Snowpack on Mount Whitney and the Mammoth Lakes area some eighty miles to the north can reach seventy feet or more in winter. But once those winds have cleared the Sierra summits, there is precious little moisture left to drop. The average rainfall in the Owens Valley itself is about six inches yearly, not much more than falls on relatively featureless Mojave. The California Department of Water Resources description of the valley’s groundwater basin offers statistical confirmation of what is apparent to any visitor’s eye: of the basin’s 1,000 or so square miles of traversable territory, 1 percent is urban in nature; another 5 percent is taken up by agricultural endeavors; the remaining 94 percent is characterized as “natural.”

  Some more attuned to city dwelling might be inclined to substitute “forlorn” for “natural,” and there is surely something of The Last Picture Show or High Plains Drifter to be encountered in the valley towns of Lone Pine (pop. 2,035), Independence (the Inyo County seat, with 669), Big Pine (1,730), and Bishop, which is, with its 4,000 or so residents, the only actual city in Inyo County. Temperatures here range from winter highs in the 50s to nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer. There are no roads that traverse the formidable Sierra to the west, and while the highway north offers access to Yosemite and Lake Tahoe, most travelers from the southland think of the route as the one that ends at Mammoth. Though the rugged White Mountains to the east can be skirted by car, those roads lead only to the true terra incognita that lies between Las Vegas and Reno. Or, to put it another way, the Owens Valley lies pretty much at the end of the road. Most people get out the same way they come in.

  And still, it is about as dramatic a landscape as can be imagined, a singular apparition that transcends any single evaluation of it. As Chalfant puts it, “Nature has written here, in bold strokes, studies more fascinating than the little affairs of humanity.” Some first-time visitors may experience a certain claustrophobic effect when that early twilight suddenly sweeps down from the Sierra, but the feeling goes beyond the simple physical fact of being caught in a dozen-mile-wide graben between two towering parallel mountain ranges. (Geologists suspect that at the time the Sierra Madre and the White Mountains were formed, the intervening valley floor was as much as 10,000 feet deeper—over the 80 million years or so since, glacial plowing and erosion off the peaks have filled the valley to its current level.)

  This is a place where, simply put, the geologic immensity of the earth asserts itself. There’s a bit of this drama at Jawbone Canyon, but here the indifference of the universe is both more dramatic and more sublime, leavened by the drama of the surrounding snowcapped peaks, the dome of an ordinarily crystalline sky, and the vista of the green-gold plains below. It is permissible, even proper, to feel dwarfed.

  There is civilization in the Owens Valley, of course. There is a sizable Crystal Geyser Natural Alpine Spring Water bottling plant in Olancha, and in Cartago there are reminders of that town’s late nineteenth-century prominence as a steamboat port where bullion mined in the Inyo Mountains across then wave-capped Owens Lake was off-loaded and hauled by mule team to Los Angeles. Not far north of Cartago stands another testament to early valley enterprise, the Ozymandian remains of a Pittsburgh Plate Glass factory put in place to utilize the mineral compounds deposited over the centuries in the lake bed. The plant was abandoned in the 1960s but still stands intact, looming above the nearby dunes like some impossible mirage from the Rust Belt.

  Lone Pine, the town from which the main trail to Mount Whitney is accessed, has a high school and a hospital, and is home to the Lone Pine Indian Reservation where 200 or so members of the Paiute-Shoshone tribe, original settlers of the valley, still live. Also near Lone Pine is the national historic site memorializing the Manzanar War Relocation Center, one of the ten Japanese-American internment camps where, during World War II, Japanese-American citizens were displaced by the US government. Any number of films have been shot in the picturesque Alabama Hills nearby, including the Humphrey Bogart classic High Sierra and Bad Day at Black Rock, which features the memorable appearance of a one-armed, black-suited Spencer Tracy come to deliver justice to the West well in advance of the High Plains Drifter.

  Sixteen miles farther north of Lone Pine is the Inyo county seat, Independence, where three blocks west of the rustic courthouse sits the Eastern California Museum, housing an Aladdin-esque trove of documents, artifacts, and exhibits pertaining to the natural and cultural history of the region, including its mining heyday, its Native American culture, the camp at Manzanar, and, of course, the building of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. The museum’s grounds also feature a native plant garden and an exhibit of various agricultural tools and implements used by settlers trying to carve a space in a difficult land. On the day of this inspection, there was a hawk perched on the museum’s gabled roof, as patient and untroubled by visitors as a wind vane, and while no rattlers coiled and buzzed in the nearby grounds, it would have seemed appropriate if they had.

  It is about fifteen miles from Independence northward to Big Pine, a town of nearly 2,000, where the Paiute-Shoshone tribe keep their offices, and from which one can make a side trip into the White Mountains for a look at the oldest living organisms on Earth, the ancient bristlecone pines, one of which is thought to have germinated in 3050 BC. From Big Pine it is another fifteen miles on to Bishop, where the road widens and traffic lights sprout, and national franchise stores butt up against cowboy-themed mom-and-pop restaurants, bars, and dry goods purveyors.

  The Bishop Paiute tribe has a reservation just north of town, and the offices of the Inyo National Forest, which encompasses vast amounts of land but very few trees, are also located in Bishop. Bishop Creek, which gives the city its name, burbles beneath US 395, here to join with the Owens River, and there is at least one pleasant inn astride its banks. There is also a local steakhouse where the meat is well marbled, the drinks are heavy on the pour, and you might catch sight of a rancher in a starched white shirt with a curl-coiffed lady on his arm, come in for a night on the town. Bishop is the last natural stopping point before one climbs northward out of the valley to ski, or hike, or find a way on to Yosemite or Lake Tahoe and the world of institutionalized tourism. It is as good a place as any for a pause.

  At Bishop, the traveler is about 265 miles north of Los Angeles in highway terms, though light years away by many other measures. There are about 10,000,000 people living in Los Angeles County and fewer than 20,000 in all of Inyo. To make the transition from cosmopolitan international seaport to high desert outpost in the course of a day is not completely unlike the sort of transport dreamed up by H. G. Wells. Though this version of time travel is utterly real, it is in its own way as disorienting as that of fiction, especially given the essential and enduring connection that stretches between two such places.

  A few miles back down the road, about thirty miles south of Bishop and perhaps ten north of Independence, there is a graveled turnoff that ambles eastward thro
ugh uninhabited scrubland in the direction of the White Mountains. There are a couple of cattle gates to be opened (and closed behind) as one descends the gentle grade, an experience in itself for anyone whose idea of civilization’s breakdown is a bottleneck at the Newhall Pass.

  A couple of dusty miles along, the road opens onto a broad sandy turnaround with a few cottonwoods shading a porta-potty and a sign to remind visitors that there is to be no overnight camping in this spot. For anyone who has read of the Owens Valley Water Wars or who is aware that the City of Los Angeles to this day derives a significant portion of its water from this source, the view of the Owens River from the banks here might seem incongruous. Though a sign erected by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power warns of swift water ahead and demands that swimmers, rafters, tube riders, and boaters exit the river at this point, “swift” is surely a relative term.

  As it approaches the diversion point that marks the beginning of the 233-mile-long Los Angeles Aqueduct, the Owens River is a languid stream perhaps fifty feet wide, cutting through gently descending scrub and pastureland. Though seasonal runoff can affect the river’s flow, there is scarcely a ripple—certainly no class-five rapids—here, and for those in whom the term “river” conjures up images of the Columbia, the Ohio, or the Potomac, the view could seem diminished.

  And still, this is the point at which it all began, the point at which it still begins. More than a hundred years ago, a self-taught engineer and a former mayor of a desert town with far more promise than water traveled to these banks by buckboard along a route that legend has it could be traced by the whiskey bottles the pair discarded along the way.